Matthew Derby Little, Brown and Company ($13.95) by Joel Turnipseed Matt Derby is twisted. Then again, so is our world, if you take the time to look at it—and through the lenses of Derby's imagination, it takes on an eccentric quality as well. This collection of some ways linked, some ways not, stories are all […]
Jenny Davidson Soft Skull Press ($14) by Liz Brown "I'm a person who feels emotion like a punch in the stomach," says Elizabeth Mann, the acerbic 25-year-old narrator of Jenny Davidson's first novel Heredity. Judging from the spare, blunt prose, the heroine took her slug to the gut sometime before the story begins and is […]
Kristen den Hartog MacAdam/Cage Publishing ($24) by Kris Lawson The Perpetual Ending is a powerful book about small things, the things that resonate when one looks back at the past. As the novel opens, Jane, the narrator, finds herself stuck in a motel room. She is halfway between her childhood home and the apartment she […]
Uma Paramesweran Broken Jaw Press ($15) by Michelle Reale In Mangoes on the Maple Tree, Canadian writer Uma Parameswaran gives us a forceful yet profound look at an Indian-Canadian family. The characters here negotiate the ordinary travails of daily life while acutely conscious of the one thing many people are hardly aware of: their national […]
Joshua Ortega Jodere Group ($24) by Alan Deniro Although it is set in the future, Joshua Ortega's ((Frequencies)) is not a science fiction novel. Judging it as science fiction would lead to a rather unforgiving review: the absence of cohesive world building, the clichéd totalitarian society, and the lackluster use of techno-thriller tropes would leave […]
Yvonne Vera Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ($18) by Christopher J. Lee In The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera describes the sense of courage held by her two sister protagonists as similar to "sliding their hands in the cotton-soft coolness of ash, where, it is possible, a flame might sparkle and burn." This too is an apt […]
Alicia Borinsky Translated by Cola Franzen with the author Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press ($15.95) by Amy Havel As many people know, love and pain can go hand in hand, but Alicia Borinsky brings this idea to a new height of absurdity in All Night Movie. Driven by stunning prose and whirlwind of frenzied action, the […]
Ezra Pound Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo Arnoldo Mondadori Editore by Steven Moore An unsympathetic critic might grumble that Pound threw everything but the kitchen sink into his 824-page Cantos, especially since the book ends with a section of "Drafts and Fragments." But in fact Pound did leave a lot out, the best of which has […]
Taha Muhammad Ali Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin Ibis Editions ($11.95) by Kim Jensen Ibis Editions, based in Jerusalem, is a small literary press which offers work related to the Levant, mainly translations from Hebrew and Arabic. Ibis has published a number of interesting little books in the past few years, including […]
Dorothy Barresi University of Pittsburgh Press ($12.95) by Hannah Brooks-Motl Rouge Pulp is Dorothy Barresi's third book of poems, and it is by far her best yet. Eschewing the clumsy and often prosaic narrative structures that fill her previous book (The Post Rapture Diner) and dot her first (All of the Above), Rouge Pulp marries […]